We introduce an annotated corpus of 600 ophthalmology notes labeled with detailed spatial and contextual information of ophthalmic entities. We extend our previously proposed frame semantics-based spatial representation schema, Rad-SpatialNet, to represent spatial language in ophthalmology text, resulting in the Eye-SpatialNet schema. The spatially-grounded entities are findings, procedures, and drugs. To accurately capture all spatial details, we add some domain-specific elements in Eye-SpatialNet. The annotated corpus contains 1715 spatial triggers, 7308 findings, 2424 anatomies, and 9914 descriptors. To automatically extract the spatial information, we employ a two-turn question answering approach based on the transformer language model BERT. The results are promising, with F1 scores of 89.31, 74.86, and 88.47 for spatial triggers, Figure, and Ground frame elements, respectively. This is the first work to represent and extract a wide variety of clinical information in ophthalmology. Extracting detailed information can benefit ophthalmology applications and research targeted toward disease progression and screening.
Speech fluency/disfluency can be evaluated by analyzing a range of phonetic and prosodic features. Deep neural networks are commonly trained to map fluency-related features into the human scores. However, the effectiveness of deep learning-based models is constrained by the limited amount of labeled training samples. To address this, we introduce a self-supervised learning (SSL) approach that takes into account phonetic and prosody awareness for fluency scoring. Specifically, we first pre-train the model using a reconstruction loss function, by masking phones and their durations jointly on a large amount of unlabeled speech and text prompts. We then fine-tune the pre-trained model using human-annotated scoring data. Our experimental results, conducted on datasets such as Speechocean762 and our non-native datasets, show that our proposed method outperforms the baseline systems in terms of Pearson correlation coefficients (PCC). Moreover, we also conduct an ablation study to better understand the contribution of phonetic and prosody factors during the pre-training stage.
While LLMs have shown great success in understanding and generating text in traditional conversational settings, their potential for performing ill-defined complex tasks is largely under-studied. Indeed, we are yet to conduct comprehensive benchmarking studies with multiple LLMs that are exclusively focused on a complex task. However, conducting such benchmarking studies is challenging because of the large variations in LLMs' performance when different prompt types/styles are used and different degrees of detail are provided in the prompts. To address this issue, the paper proposes a general taxonomy that can be used to design prompts with specific properties in order to perform a wide range of complex tasks. This taxonomy will allow future benchmarking studies to report the specific categories of prompts used as part of the study, enabling meaningful comparisons across different studies. Also, by establishing a common standard through this taxonomy, researchers will be able to draw more accurate conclusions about LLMs' performance on a specific complex task.
Audio-visual question answering (AVQA) is a challenging task that requires multistep spatio-temporal reasoning over multimodal contexts. To achieve scene understanding ability similar to humans, the AVQA task presents specific challenges, including effectively fusing audio and visual information and capturing question-relevant audio-visual features while maintaining temporal synchronization. This paper proposes a Target-aware Joint Spatio-Temporal Grounding Network for AVQA to address these challenges. The proposed approach has two main components: the Target-aware Spatial Grounding module, the Tri-modal consistency loss and corresponding Joint audio-visual temporal grounding module. The Target-aware module enables the model to focus on audio-visual cues relevant to the inquiry subject by exploiting the explicit semantics of text modality. The Tri-modal consistency loss facilitates the interaction between audio and video during question-aware temporal grounding and incorporates fusion within a simpler single-stream architecture. Experimental results on the MUSIC-AVQA dataset demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method over existing state-of-the-art methods. Our code will be availiable soon.
The eXtreme Multi-label Classification~(XMC) problem seeks to find relevant labels from an exceptionally large label space. Most of the existing XMC learners focus on the extraction of semantic features from input query text. However, conventional XMC studies usually neglect the side information of instances and labels, which can be of use in many real-world applications such as recommendation systems and e-commerce product search. We propose Predicted Instance Neighborhood Aggregation (PINA), a data enhancement method for the general XMC problem that leverages beneficial side information. Unlike most existing XMC frameworks that treat labels and input instances as featureless indicators and independent entries, PINA extracts information from the label metadata and the correlations among training instances. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the consistent gain of PINA on various XMC tasks compared to the state-of-the-art methods: PINA offers a gain in accuracy compared to standard XR-Transformers on five public benchmark datasets. Moreover, PINA achieves a $\sim 5\%$ gain in accuracy on the largest dataset LF-AmazonTitles-1.3M. Our implementation is publicly available.
Denoising diffusion models have shown great promise in human motion synthesis conditioned on natural language descriptions. However, it remains a challenge to integrate spatial constraints, such as pre-defined motion trajectories and obstacles, which is essential for bridging the gap between isolated human motion and its surrounding environment. To address this issue, we propose Guided Motion Diffusion (GMD), a method that incorporates spatial constraints into the motion generation process. Specifically, we propose an effective feature projection scheme that largely enhances the coherency between spatial information and local poses. Together with a new imputation formulation, the generated motion can reliably conform to spatial constraints such as global motion trajectories. Furthermore, given sparse spatial constraints (e.g. sparse keyframes), we introduce a new dense guidance approach that utilizes the denoiser of diffusion models to turn a sparse signal into denser signals, effectively guiding the generation motion to the given constraints. The extensive experiments justify the development of GMD, which achieves a significant improvement over state-of-the-art methods in text-based motion generation while being able to control the synthesized motions with spatial constraints.
How to efficiently transform large language models (LLMs) into instruction followers is recently a popular research direction, while training LLM for multi-modal reasoning remains less explored. Although the recent LLaMA-Adapter demonstrates the potential to handle visual inputs with LLMs, it still cannot generalize well to open-ended visual instructions and lags behind GPT-4. In this paper, we present LLaMA-Adapter V2, a parameter-efficient visual instruction model. Specifically, we first augment LLaMA-Adapter by unlocking more learnable parameters (e.g., norm, bias and scale), which distribute the instruction-following ability across the entire LLaMA model besides adapters. Secondly, we propose an early fusion strategy to feed visual tokens only into the early LLM layers, contributing to better visual knowledge incorporation. Thirdly, a joint training paradigm of image-text pairs and instruction-following data is introduced by optimizing disjoint groups of learnable parameters. This strategy effectively alleviates the interference between the two tasks of image-text alignment and instruction following and achieves strong multi-modal reasoning with only a small-scale image-text and instruction dataset. During inference, we incorporate additional expert models (e.g. captioning/OCR systems) into LLaMA-Adapter to further enhance its image understanding capability without incurring training costs. Compared to the original LLaMA-Adapter, our LLaMA-Adapter V2 can perform open-ended multi-modal instructions by merely introducing 14M parameters over LLaMA. The newly designed framework also exhibits stronger language-only instruction-following capabilities and even excels in chat interactions. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/ZrrSkywalker/LLaMA-Adapter.
Current LLMs have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in addressing users' requests for various types of information. However, these models are limited by the most recent data available in their pretraining corpora, rendering them incapable of providing up-to-date information. Retraining LLMs from scratch is cost-prohibitive, and the effectiveness of continual fine-tuning on new corpora has not been thoroughly examined. Additionally, current update procedures typically demand significant human input to prepare the information into more structured format, such as knowledge triples, conversational data or responses with human feedback. In this study, we conduct a comprehensive examination of a novel self information update task in LLMs, which only requires the provision of informative text corpora. For instance, we can use the latest news articles to update the LLMs' existing knowledge. We define the self information update task and assess the continual fine-tuning approach for this purpose. We observe that the naive method of continual fine-tuning can be problematic due to LLMs' exposure bias, which prioritizes existing information over new information we aim to integrate and leads to incorrect reasoning chains that ultimately diminish the efficacy of information updates. Based on our analysis, we propose an effective method to mitigate exposure bias by incorporating the selection of relevant facts into training losses. Furthermore, we develop a dataset to evaluate information updates, derived from news articles published after March 2023. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed approach significantly increases the factual consistency score (0 to 1) by 0.16 while having minimal impact on performance for instructions not directly related to the new information.
Retrieval-enhanced text generation, which aims to leverage passages retrieved from a large passage corpus for delivering a proper answer given the input query, has shown remarkable progress on knowledge-intensive language tasks such as open-domain question answering and knowledge-enhanced dialogue generation. However, the retrieved passages are not ideal for guiding answer generation because of the discrepancy between retrieval and generation, i.e., the candidate passages are all treated equally during the retrieval procedure without considering their potential to generate the proper answers. This discrepancy makes a passage retriever deliver a sub-optimal collection of candidate passages to generate answers. In this paper, we propose the GeneRative Knowledge Improved Passage Ranking (GripRank) approach, addressing the above challenge by distilling knowledge from a generative passage estimator (GPE) to a passage ranker, where the GPE is a generative language model used to measure how likely the candidate passages can generate the proper answer. We realize the distillation procedure by teaching the passage ranker learning to rank the passages ordered by the GPE. Furthermore, we improve the distillation quality by devising a curriculum knowledge distillation mechanism, which allows the knowledge provided by the GPE can be progressively distilled to the ranker through an easy-to-hard curriculum, enabling the passage ranker to correctly recognize the provenance of the answer from many plausible candidates. We conduct extensive experiments on four datasets across three knowledge-intensive language tasks. Experimental results show advantages over the state-of-the-art methods for both passage ranking and answer generation on the KILT benchmark.
The advent of social media has given rise to numerous ethical challenges, with hate speech among the most significant concerns. Researchers are attempting to tackle this problem by leveraging hate-speech detection and employing language models to automatically moderate content and promote civil discourse. Unfortunately, recent studies have revealed that hate-speech detection systems can be misled by adversarial attacks, raising concerns about their resilience. While previous research has separately addressed the robustness of these models under adversarial attacks and their interpretability, there has been no comprehensive study exploring their intersection. The novelty of our work lies in combining these two critical aspects, leveraging interpretability to identify potential vulnerabilities and enabling the design of targeted adversarial attacks. We present a comprehensive and comparative analysis of adversarial robustness exhibited by various hate-speech detection models. Our study evaluates the resilience of these models against adversarial attacks using explainability techniques. To gain insights into the models' decision-making processes, we employ the Local Interpretable Model-agnostic Explanations (LIME) framework. Based on the explainability results obtained by LIME, we devise and execute targeted attacks on the text by leveraging the TextAttack tool. Our findings enhance the understanding of the vulnerabilities and strengths exhibited by state-of-the-art hate-speech detection models. This work underscores the importance of incorporating explainability in the development and evaluation of such models to enhance their resilience against adversarial attacks. Ultimately, this work paves the way for creating more robust and reliable hate-speech detection systems, fostering safer online environments and promoting ethical discourse on social media platforms.